At this point, it's no surprise that email marketing is far from dead. In fact, it remains one of the most effective digital marketing strategies available. Industries from B2B to consumer-focused continue to use the channel to promote their brand, nurture leads, and enhance customer loyalty.

Especially for small businesses, picking the most relevant and successful digital marketing channel is a crucial step to achieving sustainable success. Limited budgets and time means not being able to accomplish a 'blanket approach'; instead, you have to find the channels that work best for your needs.

Regardless of your industry, closing sales opportunities probably is and absolutely should be among your major priorities for your business. If you have contacts in your database, why not do everything you can to make sure they convert to customers?

While the above is a simple fact, it can also be difficult to achieve. Again and again, we hear from small businesses looking for tips and techniques to close more sales. Lead nurturing tends to be an easy answer, but how do you set up your automated nurturing emails to maximize their success? Here's one crucial part: get the timing right.

If you plan to keep track of your audience before and after they become customers, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is crucial to keep track of all the data. Unfortunately, many of these CRM systems are expensive and/or difficult to learn, which is why especially small business tend to shy away from them.

Aligning sales and marketing teams has many impacts on a business. In the short-run, it will improve your lead generation and conversion strategies and in the long-run, it will increase the ROIs of your sales and marketing investments.

What happens when your sales and marketing teams are aligned

The benefits of sales and marketing alignment sound almost too good to be true, but we can assure you that there's no magic at play here. It's just the result of improved communication between two of your most important departments, which happen to be interdependent.

Email marketing is a vital element to your inbound marketing strategy. Cultivating your list through nurturing tactics is one of the primary objectives to closing sales and creating loyal customers of your brand. Email marketing is the bridge that converts leads into revenue. Its benefits are too great to be ignored.

Too many businesses approach customer retention with arbitrary efforts. They think that as long as they sell a good product and offer the best possible customer service, they'll automatically build customer retention.

This just leaves businesses spinning their wheels. For real improvement, you need an actual strategy that goes into specifics. Here's one way to go about improving your customer retention:

In the long-run, it's difficult to keep subscribers engaged with your email marketing campaign. The consistent factors in successful campaigns are usually high-quality content, segmented email lists, and A/B testing. But if you've already covered the basics and want more from your email marketing efforts, then focus on these aspects: